A new, low-cost mission concept to Mars would slam a projectile into the planet's surface in an attempt to look for subsurface water ice.

"I'm interested in exploring mid-latitude areas of Mars that look like they're made of snow and ice," Phil Christensen, the project's principal investigator, told SpaceDaily.com.

Christensen, of Arizona State University, and colleagues at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, are proposing a mission called THOR  for Tracing Habitability, Organics and Resources  as part of NASA's Mars Scout program.

Like last year's Deep Impact mission to comet Tempel 1, THOR aims to ram a projectile at high speed into the surface of Mars while a host spacecraft remains in orbit and observes the impact and its aftermath. If approved by NASA, the mission would launch in 2011.

That mission would be after MSL's mission. Now it is still a proposal It would cost around US$ 450 millions

THOR aims to ram a projectile at high speed into the surface of Mars while a host spacecraft remains in orbit and observes the impact and its aftermath. If approved by NASA, the mission would launch in 2011.

Strange that this would be named THOR since that was the title of an old Air Force program ("Project THOR") that studied the use of orbiting kinetic weapons that would be dropped on enemy armies (thus acheiving nuclear-style energy without the nasty side and political effects).

Hope that the impactor would make a crater close enough where MSL is driving so after that the MSL would visit the newest crater to study the perfil and probably find some steam of the pristine water steaming out due to great heat caused by the impactor.

The "Thor" name applied to both projects is obviously a reference to Thor throwing his hammer to produce lightning. (By the way, in Niven and Pournelle's "Footfall", those nasty invading baby-elephant type aliens used Thor-type kinetic weapons with devastating effect against the US Army. BAD aliens!)

It's certainly an interesting Mars Scout idea, and one I would never have dreamed of -- but I wonder just how good its produced science would actually be.

I would rather see a mars atmospheric sample return probe for 2011, which seems to have the best science per dollar ratio. But slamming a probe into mars does sounds cheap, a lot cheaper then $450 million!, I mean all you need a very simpler probe with a mission life of 6-9months, and a lot of dead weight, lets see a 1000kg probe going at 4km/s would produce about 8,000,000,000 joules or ~1.9 metric tons of TNT in energy, about the size of a large dumb bomb.

I would rather see a mars atmospheric sample return probe for 2011, which seems to have the best science per dollar ratio. But slamming a probe into mars does sounds cheap, a lot cheaper then $450 million!, I mean all you need a very simpler probe with a mission life of 6-9months, and a lot of dead weight, lets see a 1000kg probe going at 4km/s would produce about 8,000,000,000 joules or ~1.9 metric tons of TNT in energy, about the size of a large dumb bomb.

Hmm. Yes, that much kinetic energy would leave anything Thor...

(runs for cover...)

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A few will take this knowledge and use this power of a dream realized as a force for change, an impetus for further discovery to make less ancient dreams real.

Wait a minute isn't there a free return orbit that will take you to mars back to earth and then back to mars again at regular intervals? If there is then they can do both missions! A atmospheric sample return probe would skim the mars atmosphere fly back to earth and drop off a sample return capsule, and then could fly back to mars and impact. With the atmosphere sample return mission you already get a very aerodynamic space-craft (reduce lost of kinetic energy from atmospheric friction) with a heat shield strong enough to keep the craft in at least one piece before impact, and with navigation equipment accurate enough to guide the craft past mars with 1km of precision or less, accurate enough to also do a impact on mars with a few km of precision for sure.

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